Instant Messaging Planet: Coke Judges China SMS Campaign a Success

The ad campaign, which ran for a little over a month at the end of the summer, featured an interactive contest in which users would guess the highest daily temperature in Beijing via an SMS. Coke said more than 4 million messages were exchanged in the 35 days the "Coke Cool Summer" promotion ran across China. […] The SMS contest featured a television ad that encouraged consumers to enter by running a ticker pushing the contest and offering downloads of the Coke advertising jingle and McDonald's coupons. Coke said over the course of the campaign, Chinese mobile users downloaded the jingle nearly 50,000 times.

SMS might prove itself a better way to promote consumer packaged goods than the full-fledged, research-oriented web. Another important point to remember:

[T]he Coke campaign […] was user-initiated, giving the advertiser active brand interaction.